I'm John Torek. And I'm Danny Sullivan. And you're listening to Speaking of Design, bringing you the stories of the engineers and architects who are transforming the world one project at a time. Today, we'll take you to Bozeman, Montana, where two of the area's favorite pastimes depend on high quality water. That led a group of local engineers to propose an idea with the potential to benefit communities throughout the world. My name is Patrick Kanes. I'm founder, owner
of MAP Brewing Company in Bozeman, Montana. And my name is Doug Child. I'm the head brewer at MAP Brewing Company. We visited MAP Brewing to talk to Patrick and Doug about wastewater treatment, but naturally, the conversation turned to beer. We as the brewers and the owners here are more lager fans. We drink a lot of lighter lagers. Our most popular beers are definitely, our two most popular beers are heavily hopped IPAs. In 02/2019, we'll be close to brewing around 5,200 barrels
of beer. So we've had a kind of a rapid growth within a short period of time. Their growth mirrors the rise of the craft brewing industry. Montana had around 15 breweries across the state in 02/2010. Now it has more than 90. We're the second in the country for breweries per capita after Vermont. We switch back and forth between first and second with Vermont every year. So we drink a lot of beer in Montana, which is
good for us. No matter where the brewing takes place, the process creates byproducts. I guess the similarities between all breweries are the types of waste that that get produced, which is first and foremost, and I don't know if you'd call it waste, but spent grain. So we take malted barley, oats, wheat, soak that in water for an hour or more, and then we extract the sugars out of that. That ultimately becomes the beer, but you don't need the grain anymore.
So that could go to the landfill or something, but we fortunately, in most places around here, we live in an area with a lot of cattle or livestock, so we give it to a hog farmer that feeds his pigs with it. However, traditionally, there hasn't been a sustainable reuse of the second byproduct of the brewing process. There's a lot of liquid at the end that's full of tannins and other proteins and things that we don't really want to go into the boil that just goes down the drain.
What about all that liquid that goes down the drain? That sparked an idea. Well, it came from the failure of a brewery in my hometown, where I live now in Big Fork, Montana. That's Bill Buxton, a civil engineer and water marketing manager at HDR. I know this is a loaded question. Not a huge beer fan. I'm more of a wine fan. But, my favorite beer is is IPA. But wine, I'm definitely a wine guy. Back to the brewery in Big Fork.
They constructed a, brewery, and they put in this really rinky dinky pretreatment system, and they discharged the waste from that to the wastewater plant, and the pretreatment system failed massively. And so as a result, the district, the Big Fork Water and Sewer District, allowed the brewery to slowly bleed brewery waste into their system. In that winter, the plant operators noticed a surprising result.
And in talking with the district manager, what they found out is during the winter, the filterability, they have a membrane, the filterability of the wastewater improved significantly. Bill started talking to some of his engineering friends about why the brewery waste might have improved the treatment process in Big Fork. We kinda had an moment with that. Like, wait a minute. The reason that it's making the wastewater treatment process better in Bigfork is because of
the carbon. The bugs are just better and healthier. And in that case, because they're healthier, the filterability problem went away. Because Bigfork is a recreational community without as much wastewater flowing in the winter, the tiny microorganisms that help with the treatment process at the plant benefited from having more food in the wastewater in the form of carbon in the brewery waste. So Bill proposed an idea to his colleagues. It caught on pretty quick with folks.
I think everybody recognized that the brewery waste as a carbon source would be, pretty viable idea if we could work through some of the details of it. Before we wade into the brewery waste details, we should explain a little bit more about wastewater treatment. Here in Montana, we are doers of the river recreation and, the river water quality is really important to our communities. That's Coraline Rebus, a colleague of Bill's who lives in Missoula.
She's a water and wastewater project manager with a degree in environmental engineering. Not just as drinking water sources, but sources of recreation. So we love our clean water here in Montana, and we're a headwater state, so our water rolls downhill. And her favorite beer? Margaritas. If not that, then, Cold Smoke, which is a Scotch Ale that brewed at Kettle House in Missoula. Montana's clean water for outdoor recreation is a big part of what attracts people
to the state. Fishing here in Montana is, one of the number one recreation sports. In addition to all the skiing that brings folks to Montana is a little movie called, River Runs Through It, and that movie is about Missoula. We have a lot of live fishermen that are born from watching that movie and and come visit us. To keep the natural waterways pristine, the state continues to lower nutrient criteria limits for what gets discharged into the rivers
and streams by wastewater treatment plants. Removing the nitrogen and phosphorus impacts the amount of algae grown in the stream, and that algae growth can lead to what's called a d o seg, which can be negative to aquatic life, particularly young life, salmonids in the river. Cora and Bill explained that this puts pressure on local cities to use more advanced forms of wastewater
treatment. So most of these wastewater plants have biological nutrient removal to remove the nitrogen and phosphorus, and then we're looking at more stringent regulations where they might need to go lower than what they already treat. Right now, we're almost at the limit of technology here in Bozeman and constantly looking for ways to cost effectively reduce nitrogen and phosphorus going into the streams in Montana. It's a challenge facing communities across The United States.
Many wastewater treatment plant operators need to add extra carbon in the postenoxic zone to help tiny bacteria remove more nitrate from the wastewater stream. Or Cora has a better analogy. The biology is using the carbon to eat up the nitrogen in the nitrate. So they, like, take a bite of nitrogen and carbon at the same time. I don't know. Kinda like if you're gonna eat French fries, you need the ketchup. Otherwise,
you don't need it. So When the when the ketchup's gone, can't have any more French fries. To add more ketchup or carbon, plant operators are usually left with sources that are expensive. They can also be hazardous to transport and to store. Other sources of carbon are micro c, which they piloted here in Bozeman before. It's a glycerin product that you'd have to sole source and ship from a factory, and then methanol is the other commonly used one.
But methanol requires the bugs to kind of adapt to it and and grow the specific stream that can handle methanol. And methanol is also explosive and requires a lot of other safety features on site. With a team of colleagues on board, Bill went on the road to gauge the interest in the idea. I traveled around the state. I talked to breweries.
I talked to the wastewater plant just to get an idea of, you know, how would you feel if the city came and got your brewery waste and use it and put it to beneficial use, and how would you feel if we were able to inject wastewater or, brewery waste into your wastewater plant to enhance the treatment. With interest from both brewers and plant operators and some funding internally to conduct a pilot study, Bill and Cora were ready to put their idea to a test.
Bill and Cora found a willing partner at the City of Bozeman Water Reclamation Facility. Tom Ratcliffe. I'm the Water Reclamation Facility Superintendent for the City Of Bozeman. I I'm an IPA guy. I like hoppy hoppy beer, so and I like it quite a bit as you can tell. Tom oversees a state of the art biological nutrient removal facility. Yet as nutrient discharge criteria get lower and lower, it becomes even more challenging for treatment technology to keep up. Well, we're stewards of the
stream. And that and to keep the nitrogen and phosphorus levels down, it's always a challenge. Our goal has always been from the get go to reduce the nutrients going into the river as low as we can, And now they're they're trying to even bring it lower. In 02/2011, we spent $53,000,000. And and to be honest with you, we don't know if that's gonna be enough. So when Tom heard the idea, he was game. And so when Cora brought this idea to us,
we were all over it. I mean, because it's a cheap way to get our carbon that we needed to run the plant to the lower limits that we wanna run it to. We asked Tom if he thought it would work. I did. I honestly did think it would work. I mean, I have done some reading on it and and so I was all over it. And the fact that I like beer, I was just made it that much better. Bill said the next step was finding a brewery that was willing and had enough space to
participate. In a lot of cases, the breweries are in old downtown Bozeman. There's not a lot of space. All the plumbing's in a crawl space below the building. There's no place to hook up pumps. There's even a brewery up on campus where we'd have had to run a hose through the restaurant in order to get the brewery waste out into a truck. So out of the 11 breweries, maybe three could have maybe
physically worked. Fortunately, MAP Brewing, which we visited at the beginning of the podcast, checked all the necessary boxes, and owner Patrick Keynes loved the idea. When HDR came to us and said we've got this idea, we'd like to try to implement it. For us, it's a no brainer of trying to better what we're doing here on our end and then also having it have a benefit to the larger scale within
our community. Our wastewater treatment facility feeds a pretty nice river here in in the Gallatin Valley, and that river is pretty important to me. With Bozeman Water Reclamation Facility and MAP Brewery as partners, it was time to figure out the logistics. That started with how Patrick and head brewer, Doug Child, would collect the waste at the brewery.
Most breweries are not set up to collect that effluent in a reasonable manner that's not either unsightly or ungainly in some way until it gets collected by the city. After some trial and error, Patrick ended up donating a tank to the project. In the beginning, it was our collection side in trying to figure out how we are gonna collect some of our effluent to be able to be picked up by the treatment facility, by the city to see if this study is gonna work or
not. And they brought in a concrete cistern, like, 10,000 gallon concrete cistern tank, but we realized that wasn't going to work because of the weight on the on the parking lot and logistically, it just wasn't gonna happen. Yeah. Fortunately, we had a big plastic tank just sitting there, 1,500 that, we'd use for something else, and it wasn't being used anymore. So we just switched
to that. Yeah. And it worked great. Because Matt had some space to work with, getting the liquid brewery waste to the tank wasn't too difficult. We just had to run really long hoses and pumps out to the cistern that we had, basically, and it wasn't really that difficult. It didn't really take much. It took a little extra time, but if it was set up in a permanent basis, it wouldn't take much extra time. And we could we're able to collect more than we
thought we'd be able to quite easily. In fact, by fine tuning the concentration, Kura said they needed even less brewing waste than expected. The waste product itself, we took something called the second runnings, and it basically looks like beer and smells like beer. So we tried to get the most concentrated waste as possible for the carbon. And the reason we did that was to limit the volume that we
needed. So at first, we thought we were gonna need, like, 6,000 gallons a day, but we ended up only needing three to 500 gallons a day. So we were able to really bring down the volume of that waste by taking it off the brewery waste in the highest strength possible. Once the second runnings were collected, the next issue was how to transport it. My name is John Austin. I'm the water and sewer operations superintendent for the city of Bozeman. My favorite beer, Miller Lite.
Cheap date. John's department volunteered for the task of getting the second runnings from the brewery to the treatment plant. We started talking about the logistics of we were all about helping out. And, basically, our role in my department was transportation, pickup and delivery, using one of our sewer vacuum trucks to bring the waste out to the plant. The specialized truck was perfect for the job. We used a a Vactor sewer vac truck that enables us to vacuum,
usually debris, sewage. This was a little bit different for us, and that we were doing something that was more of a liquid form than what we normally are used to, but just putting it in a holding tank, and basically treating it like it would be raw sewage. That part of the operation ran pretty smoothly. So we would go out every morning to MAP Brewery, our company, and basically, sucked the, bats of the waste and put them into our holding tanks and then brought them out here to deliver it here to
the plant. Really, it wasn't that much of a logistical thing. I think it was a little bit weird to see a a City of Bozeman truck hanging out of the brewery. Bill Buxton noted that even when there was a hiccup with transporting the brewery waste, it still had a bright side. One of the side benefits of using brewery waste is that here in a on a wastewater plant, if you have
spillage, it's usually pretty terrible stuff. Right? We were in the process of taking the brewery waste from the, the vector truck into the tanks before we injected into the bioreactors, and they spilled a whole bunch on the ground and and The plug was missing from the bottom. The plug was missing from the bottom of the tank. Yeah. Anyway, we ended up with a bunch of waste on the ground, and I can just tell you that that the smell of beer is far better than the smell of partially treated sewage.
It's not like grapefruit. Grapefruit. Yeah. And all the collection guys were like, this is way better than what we usually do. Yeah. It must have been an IPA, I think. When the brewing waste arrived at the plant, city volunteers helped Cora and Bill implement the test and take samples. We had a ton of people donating their time to do this.
The city of Bozeman donated all their time to collect the waste, and the staff here at the wastewater plant donated all their time to to put a pump together and put the whole feed system and put that into operation and And run the samples in the lab. The pilot test ran for three weeks, and Cora explained the process in more detail. So the bioreactors here in Bozeman, there's two of them that are exactly the same, and they're a mirror image of each other. So we are able to use one as a
control and the other as the variable. We had the perfect setup to be able to do this kind of experiment. First, they had to make sure the brewery waste had the right properties they wanted to add to the treatment process. When we did the sampling, we discovered that the yeast had a high amount of phosphorus, as much as
600 milligrams per liter. So we decided we didn't want any of the yeast in the wastewater that we were collecting and dosing toward the end of the BNR train because we didn't want any of the phosphorus bleeding through and going out the back of the plant. Then it was just a matter of setting up a pump to add just the right amount of brewery waste. And so we had, a tank here with a peristaltic metering pump that would feed up to almost
a gallon per minute of brewery waste. And so we had the brewery waste brought here in the vac truck and put into this tank. And then we had it pumped through some plastic tubing up and into the bioreactor and down through the shaft of a mixer that we have in the bioreactor so that the brewery waste would go right in the
zone where we wanted. So we dosed it in the post anoxic zone where the carbon from the influent is all used up already and is basically the the limiting factor on how much lower you can go on the nitrogen side and dosed the brewery waste right into the bottom of that zone, had it mixed right in with the mixer there. With everything in place, the three week pilot study was ready to begin. So the first day, Bill and I are here.
We turn it on, and we had already asked, like, how fast is this reaction gonna happen? Like, are we gonna have to wait a while? Instantaneous. Instantaneous. Instantaneous. So we turn it on out there, and we're so excited to rush back to the main plant skater at the Admin Building here. And we look at it. Wah wah. Nothing happened. And we're like, oh, no. Like, it didn't work. And and all of us thought for sure it would work. We knew the science
behind it and that it should work. So Bill and Cora regrouped with their team that continued troubleshooting with volunteers from the wastewater plant. And here's where the story gets extremely technical. We were working with the lab guys and the process guys and discovered that any amount of air that bled through the aerobic zone into the post anoxic zone would suck up the carbon immediately. And so, even though we were dosing carbon, we weren't dosing enough to overcome the amount of
air that was bleeding in there. So in the anoxic zone, you want nitrate, n o three, so you have oxygen in the nitrate, but you don't want any other oxygen, because the bugs that live there need to take the oxygen off the nitrate. So any oxygen bleeding through would suck up the carbon right away. And so we were able to make sure the valves that put, dissolved oxygen into those zones were modulating correctly, that they were the exactly the same between the two bioreactors, so we had good control
over that. And then we were able to see the steady decline and significant impact of the brewery waste. After conducting the pilot for three weeks, Cora and Bill were happy to report the result. So the pilot study worked. We were thrilled. Results were that we were able to lower the total nitrogen leaving the plant by 25 to 40%.
So they already remove they go from, like, 40 milligram per liter coming in down to four milligram per liter coming out, and we were able to lower that to two and a half milligrams per liter total nitrogen. And that works just by driving that nitrogen reaction, making sure the the bugs have the carbon they need to continue
to remove that nitrate. I think generally speaking, two and a half or three milligrams per liter is about the limited technology today, and we are able to drive that down with waste that's otherwise just dumped in the sewer. The science of using brewery waste as a source of carbon in the wastewater treatment process proved successful. Implementing the idea full time on a greater
scale will require sorting through more details. Doug and Patrick from MAP Brewing were proud to be part of the project, though they acknowledge there would need to be additional details worked out to make it a regular operation. But to me, I immediately felt excited for the potential for us to be able to give back to the community, do something with our wastewater that's really productive, save the city money probably in the long run or at least having to expand their
wastewater treatment for a while. I mean, that'd be really a big deal for us. I think there's a lot of breweries that would be interested in collecting portions of their their waste, their effluent, and having it used for a second life in itself. But it's also a cost in the beginning. What's it gonna cost that
brewery? What are the logistics of it? And if those two things can kinda be figured out without it really affecting the production side of the brewery and then also the cost of the implementation of it, it should be pretty simple in being able to implement. As Cora pointed out, brewers in Montana may not have the financial incentive to foot the bill right now. But elsewhere, some larger cities charge
higher disposal fees for brewery waste. And an agreement to collect and repurpose the brewery waste might be a way to offset those fees. So the brewers usually, here in Bozeman, brewery waste just goes down the drain in the regular sewer. So while the carbon is coming in, it's not going where we want
it to go. And in Bozeman, they don't charge high strength waste fees, so the brewers have no incentive to try to meter that evenly throughout the day, so it's not beneficial and you have to size for that much treatment. And then in some cities that charge for a high strength waste, maybe there's more of an opportunity to look at a partnership of, okay, if you collect it and give it to us when we want it, maybe we won't charge
you as much. Cora and Bill said they think that as environmental regulations become stricter, cities and local breweries will likely see even more benefit to a partnership. I don't think you just do this for the heck of it, but I think as time goes on and you see more people or more regulations placed on communities driving the nutrient standards down,
that demand will increase. Especially if it could be done in a more proactive way where when you design an upgrade to a plant, you can design in facilities to accept and inject the brewery waste. As more breweries are added to Bozeman or other cities throughout the West, you can have them add in facilities to store the wastewater or the brewery waste so that there's an easy way to collect
it in the future. I'm picturing, like, kind of a synergistic relationship where they would work together to be able to collect the brewery waste in a cost effective manner and dose it here in also a cost effective manner. I don't think there's a driver for that until the nitrogen limits come lower or the breweries start having high strength fees, associated to them like other cities do. But eventually, it'd be great to see everyone working together and and make this project a full
scale. Cora said she thinks the idea can make an impact beyond Montana. The greater application would be anywhere that facility is needing more carbon source, that we would look to beneficially reusing our waste streams. That could be done with brewery waste, with distillery waste, with wineries, anything similar. The impact of this globally, it's it's hard to comment on. I don't see the world becoming less environmental. And definitely, as we become more and more environmentally conscious, this
this idea may grab hold. Not only can we purpose a waste product in a positive way, but we can also use that to enhance the water quality of all of our streams and lakes throughout the world. For more information on this podcast, visit hdrinc.com/speakingofdesign. You'll find links to pictures, articles, and more information about this project. If you like what you heard, be sure to rate us or leave feedback on iTunes, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.
I suppose since we asked everyone else in this episode, should ask you what's your favorite beer? My favorite beer typically is a stout, and that's probably my background of drinking a lot of coffee, so I'm used to that kind of heavier, darker flavors. And I think my current flavor of the month would probably be an IPA. So now that we're done with the episode, maybe it's our turn to finally sample some of the beer that we brought back from Montana. Well, I am trying here a
lager. So let's get this in charge. And I couldn't wait, so I just went straight out of the can. Cheers. Cheers. Yeah. That's good.